The third pole in Iranian politics is the one that interests me

FRONT PAGE: "Iranian Leaders Gaining the Edge Over Protesters," By NAZILA FATHI and MICHAEL SLACKMAN, New York Times, June 27, 2009.

The key bit:

Throughout the crisis, events in Iran have focused on two camps: the opposition, led by Mir Hussein Moussavi, a former prime minister, and the camp surrounding Mr. Ahmadinejad, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the military and security agencies. But there is a third group of more pragmatic military and security figures who have competed with Mr. Ahmadinejad but are believed to remain close to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Two of the most influential in that group are the mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, a former commander in the Revolutionary Guards, and the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, the nation's former chief nuclear negotiator. Both ran for president four years ago and want to run again, and have at times been sharp critics of Mr. Ahmadinejad's stewardship. Political analysts have described them as loyal to the leader and committed to Islamic government, but eager for a more modern state integrated with the rest of the world.

Ghalibaf (I usually spell Qalibeaf, but who's counting?) is the one who has long interested me, because he's the technocrat, but Larijani is far more important now as speaker of the parliament and arguably the real opposition leader of note going forward (he has voiced plenty of concerns about the election). I see one long and ugly fight between the presidency and the parliament.

AAA = Old Core, BBB- to AA+ = New Core, BB+ and below = Gap

BONDS: "Cashing In On Foreign Debt," by Ben Levisohn and Tara Kalwarski, BusinessWeek, 29 June 2009.

Just an interesting map where Old Core largely has the best bond ratings, New Core roughly the next best, and Gap countries the worst.

The highest yields on bonds = New Core

NUMBERS: "Where to Find The Highest Yields," by Tara Kalwarski, BusinessWeek, 29 June 2009.

Pakistan leads. Other current leaders are Brazil, Turkey, Hungary, South Africa, Mexico, Peru and India.

Almost nobody pays what they were paying a year ago, with the biggest percentage drops among the Old Core's stalwarts.

The undeniable prison state

OPINION: "Inside North Korea's Gulag," by Melanie Kirkpatrick, Wall Street Journal, 16 June 2009.

The usual scary stuff from those rare few who have escaped the political camps.

Nice bit at end:

In the epilogue to "The Aquariums of Pyongyang," his 2000 book about growing up in the infamous Yodok prison camp, Kang Choi-Hwan expresses his anger at the world's indifference to the human-rights abuses in the North. "We're told that this debate would be better left until another day," he writes. "But by then we'll all be dead."

Strategic communications aren't trusted--as a rule

THE WORLD: "Iraqis Aren't Buying It: Media campaign dismissed as U.S. propaganda," by Ernesto Londono, Washington Post, 15-21 June 2009.

A caustic description of Baghdad Now, an Arabic-language newspaper that highlights the usual skill sets the U.S. Government brings to strategic communications.

Other efforts are mentioned, none kindly.

One Iraqi sums up a set of commercials thusly: "These commercials are boring, poor and annoying. Everyone knows they're American--not Iraqi-made."

The first real American ambassador to Iraq

PROFILE: "The Negotiator: Unlike his predecessors, the new U.S. ambassador in Baghdad can't rely on cash and troops to push Washington's interests in Iraq," by Bobby Ghosh, Time, 22 June 2009.

Four-to-five years ago I had dinner with Christopher Hill (set up by a mutual friend), and I will tell you: the guy comes off as completely genuine and sensible and quite smart. He struck me as having the perfect sort of mind for a negotiator: intelligent and flexible but not excessively imaginative; not your "vision guy" but your deal-maker--thus incredibly grounded.

No, he's not a Middle East expert. But I think he's a great choice for Iraq. Lots to negotiate there between them and us, and between them and them and them.

Clearly Obama's Achilles' heel

UNITED STATES: "The politics of debt: Seeing red; America's debt is Barack Obama's biggest weakness," The Economist, 13 June 2009.

It's the late 1980s and early 1990s all over again.

Remember when we were going to retire America's debt in X years and we debated whether or not that would be a good thing?

Still, no argument that this is once again a preeminent political issue--with good reason.

The op-ed I've been waiting for regarding gay marriage

OP-ED: "Why I Now Support Gay Marriage," by Tom Suozzi, New York Times, 13 June 2009.

Good piece.

Gist: civil unions just don't cut it (they smack of separate but equal systems), but civil marriages are no threat to religiously sanctioned marriages.

So you allow same-sex civil marriages to give gay couples all the same legal rights as straight ones, but you also allow churches to opt out at their discretion. There are and always will be plenty of civil laws that churches essentially opt-out of--like the right to have an abortion (legal, but not acceptable in the eyes of many churches). The same will always be true for gay marriage. But since the government has always granted non-believers the same marriage rights (civil marriages) as believers, such rights must inevitably be extended to gays.

Only fault I take with piece: I could have used a listing of the deficiencies of civil unions compared to civil marriages.

I think most of this debate occurs in a knowledge vacuum, the predominant question being, "Should we let gays get married just like heterosexuals do?"

I guess I'd like to see the debate framed more popularly as: "These are the rights denied to same-sex civil union participants that would be granted to same-sex civil marriage participants. [List.] Now, when it comes to your siblings or your kids or your good friends, do you think it's correct for America to deny gays those rights, so long as your church would still be able to decide on its own whether or not it wanted to solemnize such marriages according to its spiritual traditions?"

That, I think, would be a fairly easy evolution to pursue politically.

So what is the list?

Tom on The Leading Edge today

Peace and Politics With Thomas Barnett mp3.

Tom's note:

I screwed up in one place, mixing my premillenarianism and postmillenarianism. I forgot that it's counter-intuitive--at least to me. The premillenarian await the apocaplypse/2nd coming, with Christ's appearance kicking it off, while the postmillenarians believe Christ appears at the end of the millennial transformation.

When I think pre-, I naturally think "achieve heaven on earth" and then He appears. And when I think post-, I naturally think, "it can't start until after He appears.

I sort of had the feeling I was getting it backward as I was saying it. I rarely use the construct, in part because I always mix them up!

Take it as another sign of the looming Apocalypse!

I blama myself.

Mindy was fun, though. Enjoyed the hour.

Tom's on the radio this afternoon

Interview coming up at 3 ET with Mindy Audlin of Unity.FM. The show is called The Leading Edge and here's a little bit about Mindy:

Mindy Audlin is a licensed Unity teacher and the Network Producer for The Unity Radio Network online at www.unity.fm. Formerly the Spiritual Leader of Unity Church of Wimberley in Wimberley, Texas, Mindy has inspired audiences around the world as a speaker, author, and workshop facilitator. A member of the National Speakers Association, Mindy launched her first online radio program in 2001. Now, she brings together some of the most innovative leaders in the Unity Movement and beyond to provide ongoing spiritual support to people of all faiths and religious backgrounds.

Click here to listen in.

The ultimate in SysAdmin commitment

OPINION: "General McChrystal's New Way of War," by Max Boot, Wall Street Journal, 17 June 2009.

The key bit

Gen. McChrystal's decision to set up a Pakistan Afghanistan Coordination Cell means creating a corps of roughly 400 officers who will spend years focused on Afghanistan, shuttling in and out of the country and working on those issues even while they are stateside.

Today, units typically spend six to 12 months in a war zone, and officers typically spend only a couple years in command before getting a new assignment. This undermines the continuity needed to prevail in complex environments like Afghanistan and Iraq. Too often, just when soldiers figure out what's going on they are shipped back home and neophytes arrive to take their place. Units suffer a disproportionate share of casualties when they first arrive because they don't have a grip on local conditions.

There was a saying that we didn't fight in Vietnam for 10 years; we fought there for one year, 10 times.

This development is far more crucial than news that McChrystal has been offered the right to pick an all-star team, because the rotational approach has long been our Achilles' heel.

As a note, this is basically what Admiral Harry Ulrich (now with Enterra) did (as NATO commander in Naples) with naval civ-mil affairs reservists covering various African regions. He simply told teams they would focus on a small number of African states, year-in and year-out across their careers, and let them work the details regarding their active-duty deployments and reservist duties back home. By giving them such focus, he actually got a lot more effort than officially required, because personnel became deeply devoted to their collective deep dive.

Good move by McChrystal. Good sign for the SysAdmin force's continued development.

Pentagon Swaps 'Lesser Includeds' for 'Greater Inclusive'

Back before the Iraq surge, "military operations other than war" -- a now-antiquated term referring to non-traditional warfare -- were treated as "lesser includeds," filed deep under subsections of big-war plans, doctrine, and acquisition strategies. Today, by contrast, the U.S. national security establishment is increasingly embracing what I like to call the "greater inclusive" paradigm, which recognizes our military's rising quotient of such operations, not as some rare exception, but rather as the new rule.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules column for WPR this week.

More than one Iranian bomb

OP-ED: Iran's Second Sex, By ROGER COHEN, New York Times, June 26, 2009

Nice piece from Cohen again, underscoring the role of women in the protest movement in Iran.

Women marched in 1979, too. But when the revolution was won, women were pushed out. Their subjugation became a pillar of the Islamic state. One woman told me that she had been 20 when she fought to oust the shah. "It's simple," she said. "We wanted freedom then, and we don't have it now."

In a way it is simple: laws that can force a girl into marriage at 13; discriminatory laws on inheritance; the segregated beaches on the Caspian; the humiliation of arrest for a neck revealed or an ankle-length skirt (a gust of wind might show a forbidden flash of leg); the suffocation that leads one artist I know to raise her hands to her neck.

Basic angry stuff.

More subtly:

I don't want to suggest that Iran is a nation of women thirsting to cast off their chadors. As Saeed Leylaz told me before he was thrown in jail along with most of Iran's reformist brain trust, "Our feet are in traditionalism and our heads in modernism." Zahra Rahnavard, the strong-willed wife of Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, troubled as she inspired.

When a friend asked one Ahmadinejad supporter his reasons, the reply was brusque: because "all the whores are with Moussavi." Cultural battle lines of great clarity have been drawn since June 12.

The oft-noted bit about 60% of college students being women. That, my friends, is one ticking social time bomb, of which Iran has so many.

Yet another reason why I choose not to freak out over the Iranian bomb.

Tehran and oppression

ARTICLE: In Tehran, a Mood of Melancholy Descends, By NAZILA FATHI, New York Times, June 27, 2009

Wasn't happy to make this prediction (lack of serious legs on the upheaval). It just struck me as so spontaneous as to be too easily crushed.

Now we head into the forced confessions phase, which is pretty typical of authoritarian regimes (old trick for China). But unlike today's China, there doesn't seem to be any gives offered here, which either demoralizes the opposition or angers them into even more committed actions--namely, strikes.

Listen to this bit:

"We used to sell nearly $2,000 a day," said a woman at an Islamic coat shop on Haft-e Tir Square. "But since the election, our sales have dropped to $900 a day." She gave only her first name, Mahtab, citing fear of retribution.

Like many others who spoke, Mahtab said she was depressed by what she had seen since the election. She said that she was not a political person and had not even voted June 12, but that the repression on the streets was "beyond belief."

"I am disgusted, and wish I could leave this country," she said.

She said she had seen a paramilitary officer outside the shop hit a middle-aged woman in the head so hard that blood streamed down the woman's forehead.

When Mahtab and her colleagues tried to leave the shop to go home, she said, the forces began clubbing them while shouting the names of Shiite saints. "They do this under the name of religion," she said. "Which religion allows this?"

Not a good sign for the regime when you alienate those just trying to keep their heads down.

How authoritarian is Iran?

ARTICLE: Understanding Iran: Repression 101, By DAVID E. SANGER, New York Times, June 27, 2009

Which model of authoritarian-shifting/evolving-to-something-else might Iran fit? South Korea? China? Burma? What?

"It's too early to draw any conclusions about which model fits in Iran," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was born in Warsaw and had the thankless task, as Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, of trying to establish relations with the leaders of Iran's revolution in 1979. "But in this case, I have to say I'm pessimistic in the short term, and optimistic in the long term."

That pretty well captures the mood of Mr. Obama's advisers.

Good bit from Litwak:

Robert Litwak, the author of "Regime Change," a study of how modern regimes have fallen, said last week: "The truth here is that a soft landing for Iranian society is not a soft landing for the leadership." So far, he observed last week, "the Iranians are not as sufficiently united against the regime as the Poles were in the late '80s." Moreover, the Polish regime was more fragile: Because it was considered a Soviet tool, the opposition could play to nationalist emotions.

But I think he discounts nationalism too easily as a source for change, so long as Obama continues to deny Tehran a preferred enemy.

Blame Britain

ARTICLE: Iran Arrests Local British Embassy Employees, By Edward Yeranian, VOA News, 28 June 2009

The usual Iranian BS: when scared, arrest the British and blame everything on them.

Authoritarian regimes really are like children in their predictable fears and threat reactions.

The importance of Iranian women protesters

ARTICLE: Role of Women In Iran Protest Kindles Hope, By Sudarsan Raghavan, Washington Post, June 28, 2009

Great stuff to see women in the region view Iranian women as an example of stepping forward into useful protest.

It gets hard to see a Middle East someday transformed for the better without an Iran being part of the process. It's just too important a pillar in the region--both good and bad.

Being a woman inside the Gap really sucks, Part (whatever)

FRONT PAGE: "Where Life's Start Is a Deadly Risk: Impoverished Tanzania Struggles to Save Mothers and Babies," by Denise Grady, New York Times, 24 May 2009.

GLOBAL UPDATE: "Giving a Deworming Drug to Girls Could Cut H.I.V. Transmission in Africa," by Donald G. McNeil Jr., New York Times, 26 May 2009.

Pregnancy and childbirth kill half a million women globally every year, with half just in Africa (and you know the vast bulk of the rest happen inside my Gap regions). Most are preventable, so where care exists in sufficient quantity and quality, this has stopped being an issue.

Like the deworming drug issue, the amount of money required to truly upgrade the situation globally is small.

The problem usually is staying power. When it comes in terms of public aid, local capacity tends to remain retarded: you fix something and then release your catch back into the wild to its fate. Thus, the overall impact is weak, despite the do-goodedness behind the act.

The real question, as always, is how to make the provision of basic medical care highly profitable in such environments. Create the profit possibility, and the care will follow. Keep it a matter of hit-or-miss public aid, and the Gap will remain a very deadly place--especially for women.

Great overview of the great globalization build-out going on inside China

WORLD: "Rebuilding The Middle Kingdom: To cushion itself against recession, China is investing in one of the most ambitious public-works programs ever seen," by Simon Elegant and Austin Ramzy, Time, 1 June 2009.

Clear proof that Time actually remains a news magazine: Look! An actual story!

Bit of a misdirect on the causality: this build-out long in the planning and making and executing. It was merely sped up in response to the global economic crisis, but it was going to unfold anyway.

Good overview, with the usual stuff sprinkled in about China's "growing assertiveness" that, to me at least, consists mostly of complaining.

The inevitable cap-and-trade on CO2 in America

FRONT PAGE: "House Passes Bill to Address Threat of Climate Change," By JOHN M. BRODER, New York Times, June 27, 2009.

Been waiting on this one since the 2001 economic security exercise I did with Cantor Fitzgerald atop World Trade Center One. Cap-and-trade had worked wonders with SOx and NOx in the early 1990s, and Cantor was selling the notion of similar markets for Asia--hence the game design. The consensus around the table (national security types, intell, executive branch officials, enviro groups, energy companies) was that some sort of restriction would inevitably come and that cap-and-trade would be the likely first attempt.

So here we go . . . . the first time either side of Congress passes a bill.

But I do agree with Gore that it was important to create some momentum on our side heading into the December treaty talks. China takes his all so seriously that, if we were to blow it off, it would come off like another huge global problem that we're purposefully ignoring. I did come away from my Shanghai experience with top Chinese academics convinced they saw global warming and CO2 control as a very big deal and that they were grateful that we now had a president who thought similarly. Doesn't mean China won't negotiate tooth-and-nail. Doesn't mean we won't have to cut them more slack than ourselves, given their still impoverished masses. Just means the conversation has begun for real.